Stack Smashing

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Posts posted by Stack Smashing

  1. Posted

    The last Pokemon I played at all seriously was Silver when it came out and the last one I played for a few minutes was Ruby. So I was really surprised by the first 90 minutes I played of Moon so far. This feels legitimately fresh and different from the past games. They did a good job making the world feel more alive, from the really neat level design to the fact that domestic Pokemon now roam around the house. And it looks really good as well, especially the animations.

  4. Posted

    So I ended up having less time (and motivation) than I anticipated. But it was very important to me to at least get to a remotely playable state. Just as a prototype. And I did it! Most of the work was done the first and third day as well as today. So don't expect too much (anything). But get together with a friend, try to play it, and laugh at how clunky this thing is: https://jonasmerlin.itch.io/ill-kill-the-last-alien

     

    Maybe I'll work on it some more in the future. Some of the ideas I had I actually would like to see and play. But for the moment, I'm mostly glad I finished something in time. (My first "game". :))

     

    Thanks for organizing this jam btw. Even if I did end up doing so little, it was a lot of fun and all he projects being released are an inspiration. There is amazing talent and creativity on display in every one of them, it's really quite something. Especially for such a short period of time.

  5. Posted

    Yeah, I have a tab open in which I only have to press one more button to buy the thing as well.

     

    Edit:

     

    Which makes this the second weird plain-board electronics gadget this Wizard Jam made me want to buy actually. Over in the team building thread Salacious Snake turned me on to the Pocket Operator Arcade synthesizer.

  8. Posted

    So here's my status after the first day:

     

     status_1st_day.gif?dl=1

     

    It might very well be obvious from this GIF that I still have no clue what exactly I'm trying to accomplish. (What might not be obvious is that the alien has a glorious 2-frame walking animation, and a long, ant-lion like tongue.)

     

    The first thing I did was to install Tiled to generate the tile maps. And then I went down the rabbit hole that is sprite editors. I considered and installed most of them, but settled on the node-webkit version of Piskel in the end. It's nature as a packaged web app leads to some weirdness, but it does almost everything I want and does it pretty well actually. The only thing I'm missing is the ability to move selection contents. But maybe that's possible and I simply can't figure out how. Then it would simply be an intuitive interface that I'm missing.

  9. Posted

    Cool! Thought about using Pico-8 as well but pushed it to "maybe the next jam." Nice to see it here. I would be really interested in some technical details regarding the development, so please don't shy away from writing about this in your log.

     

    Any idea on what the gameplay will be?

  11. Posted

     ... so yeah, that is exactly what I did: Random Diversifier Selector

     

    Colors are off, nothing is tested, so it might not even work for everyone and the usefulness of this is highly questionable since there are only 9 diversifiers to begin with. But maybe some of you can find some use for it.

     

    Maybe I can find an easy way for everyone to do pull requests with new diversifiers so the thing can grow over time/jams?

  13. Posted

    Happy jamming to all of you! I hope I can find some time tomorrow to start. Sadly, the weather will be really good and social obligations (as well as Captain America: Civil War ) will likely delay me a bit. :/

     

    Those diversifiers are great btw. Will definitely try to incorporate one.

  14. Posted

    Btw: the Phaser page has a bunch of examples where it runs in the browser and the code is directly beneath it, Super useful.

    http://phaser.io/examples

    I like the api page, but it doesn't include examples there like it does in the Unity documentation (which I've always relied on heavily).

    I was going to do the Asteroids tutorial this morning, but I got side-tracked trying to understand why I these scripts don't have to declare variables with their type. This 'var' thing feels strange.

     

    Yes, the examples are really helpful. Also I love the feature that each method in the API Docs links to its place in the source code. This can really clear up some confusion regarding the general functioning of Phaser or what a method really does.

     

    The dynamic nature of JavaScript can be really nice and flexible, but it also leads to situations where it is unnecessarily hard to determine what a function expects. You can use the already mentioned TypeScript if you really don't like it. It's a superset language developed by Microsoft that allows for full Object Orientation, and compiles to really clean and readable native JavaScript.

    But you can also just kinda roll with it and see if you get used to it. There's some debate over which is better in general - dynamic or static typing - and both sides have good arguments, so it can't be bad to have some experience in both kinds of languages.

  15. Posted

    That's one of the concepts I'm thinking about. I'm not too focused on the details right now, I'm just trying to get the physics working reliably. I could end up even doing a multiplayer mode if there's enough time (Which of course there won't be, but it'd be nice.)

     

    That's cool! I'm currently planning to do a local multiplayer game as well, inspired by the likes of Samurai Gunn, Nidhogg, Foiled etc. We'll see how that goes. I haven't yet found a specific idea that's interesting enough to try.

  16. Posted

    Making progress. ('Space' to flap)

    For reference I used the second Flappy Bird tutorial and skipped the death animation because I was anxious to play with sound.

     

    Super good, glad you're getting the hang of it. Skip the other FB Tutorial/Generator stuff altogether btw. It only teaches features that lead to confusion in the long run. At least I am confused right now how to get Phaser Plug-Ins to work correctly with its System. (Though the auto load server stuff is nice etc.)

     

    That prototype looks cool Vasari. Will it play a bit like Pinball, like spots in the level against which you have to shoot the enemies to gain points? (Probably reading to0 much into your description of the enemies' behavior.)

  17. Posted

    There is probably a really straightforward way to do that, but the way I did it without even specifically wanting to was: use Sublime Text (anyway), install TypeScript, install the SL TS Plug-In and then put the following at the beginning of my file:

    /// <reference path="<relative path to phaser>/phaser/typescript/phaser.d.ts" />

    That last part was intentional, of course.

    I also found this: https://github.com/angelozerr/tern-phaser

  18. Posted

    @Stack Smashing

    Does it handle audio well?

    I guess either way, this seems like a good opportunity to learn an html-exportable framework. I'm interested. I'll download Phaser and watch a few tutorial videos.

    If you have any particular recommendations to save me time, I'm listening.

     

    It does do audio of course, though I haven't really used it for anything other than playing some sound effects yet, so I can't really say how well.

     

    And great! I can't speak for video tutorials but I liked this written one where you build a near perfect Flappy Bird clone: http://www.codevinsky.com/phaser-2-0-tutorial-flappy-bird-part-1/ 

     

    Depending on your prior knowledge of JavaScript and its rather ... rich ecosystem, you might want to start with this one though, where you build a more stripped down version of FB.

     

    If you decide to go with the first one: The Yeoman generator he uses is quite old and not maintained, and if you decide to ultimately use one, as I did, generator-phaser-plus is what I would recommend. It is really close to the one he uses, but the boilerplate it creates uses ES6 features by way of Babel so you'll either have to know a bit about it or simply replace the generated code with the one he posts.

    (There's one with fewer features as well.)

     

    If you have any questions about anything of this I'll be glad to try and help.

     

    And if you really hate Flappy Bird for some reason, here's one that uses Asteroids as an example.

  19. Posted

    In anticipation of Wizard Jam I'm currently teaching myself to code simple things in Phaser. Has anyone else any interest in using this framework? It's a HTML5/JavaScript framework for 2D games and it is quite mature. (Version 2.5 is currently in Beta.)

     

    It provides nice portability with the ability to embed games into basically any website, packaging it as a stand alone executable using Electron and, with some work, as Mobile Apps using something like Cordova. Though I haven't tried that last one yet.

     

    If anyone of you is interested I could get you up to speed, and then we could learn together. (By that I not necessarily mean make a game together, just help each other out.)

  20. Posted

    I decided to make a list of all the media related things I started at one point and never finished, but which I still intend to. ... man, there is so much stuff on it, I really need some time to catch up. It actully makes me a litte bit anxious, though writing most of it down already helped. (Im shure I forgot a lot of things.) It's not so much that I feel an obligation to watch, play and read all these things, but that I really want to. But I also really love that rush you get from starting something new. The possibilities of what it could be.

    Also, it's weird watching a series you left years ago and feeling how you seem to have moved beyond it, even though it was something that really defined you in a way at one point in time. (As much as liking a piece of media can and should define you. I'm not crazy.)

  21. Posted

    The thing I liked most about the book is its focus on how sexism and racism, or more generally: tragic life events, can spiral out into family life and how insecurities and traumata are passed on through the generations and transform. Often into things that are very hard to trace back to their original source.

     
    Reading the book I became very aware of the fact that some of the experiences my grandfather and grandmother had during World War 2 manifest themselves in myself by way of my father and his relationship to his parents. Basically that mental wounds of a certain scale don’t heal in a lifetime, but over generations. And even then only if many things go right.
     
    The depth and quality with which the book explored this topic was sadly not too deep and I actually think that the book was a bit too long for the story Ng wanted to tell. Though focusing on a very specific experience was a great thing, and the experience she chose does feel underexplored in fiction and culture in general.
     
    Consequently I really enjoyed the few details about the life of Chinese immigrants during the 30s. Looking back they almost feel out of place though, being there only to make a few points about James before moving on. (I guess this wasn’t the story Ng wanted to tell, but I kinda wish it was, considering her characters weren’t strong enough for the strictly personal angle in my opinion.)
     

    The revelation that Lydia didn’t want to kill herself was okay in my book, but the whole scene of her then stepping into the water felt somehow out of place. Also Jack’s homosexuality was maybe a bit much in terms of socially marginalized groups, considering the small cast. It felt constructed and like one more character that was there only to make a point the author already made quite well.

  24. Posted

    The title of this thread and first sentence of the story led me to assume we were gathering ideas for how to best make Chris Remo uncomfortable now that you realilzed you are on the same bus as him. Imagine if instead of mumbling his name you whispered "Spelunky is not that good" just as he's walking past.

    Exactly what I was thinking as well. "More like Barf Hall, amirite?!"

  25. Posted

    @Stack Smashing If you haven't seen it the Tron Uprising series is worth checking out. Obviously geared towards young teens and the story takes awhile to get less cringey but the Art Direction alone makes it worth a viewing imo 

     

     

    Totally forgot that this exists. (And never knew how interesting it looks. The Art Director cutting this video to this music is promising.) Will definitely give it a chance, thanks for the recommendation!